The Wolf (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #2)(21)

Stepping past the table and stool, he pushed his way out onto the porch. The loggia was fairly shallow, but long as the entire wing, and as he went to the rail and looked out over the sanatorium’s hill of skeletal trees and dead grass, he imagined the humans who had lain here, knowing they had something incurable in their bodies, aware that people just like them were disappearing from the rooms beside their own—and not because they were being cured and leaving healthy.

They had been prisoners here, isolated from the general population, through no fault of their own.

As he leaned over the drop, he glanced down the building’s elevation. From this vantage point, the enormity of the structure really struck him. Although not that tall off the ground, with its enormous, embracing wings, it seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see, like an ocean.

And yet for all the floors, and all the porches, there was nobody else staring out like he was.

No one but him, and maybe Mayhem and Apex, ever came up here. The prison camp’s operation was underground, in the vast subterranean rabbit warren of spaces in the basement levels.

The sanatorium was literally the perfect location for a bunch of solar-avoiding vampires running a drug-processing business. Much better than that happy-hands-at-home system of tunnels they’d been in before. Not that the move had gone well. About two hundred prisoners had died soon after arrival, something about the new environment being the last domino to fall in their miserable existence, their strained hearts and bad lungs giving out.

Good thing they had the chute for the bodies here.

Just like when the place had treated humans with a terminal disease, the dead had been sent down a thousand-foot-long shaft that bottomed out at the base of the rise the building sat on. But unlike when those humans had been removed, the vampire bodies didn’t need to be carted away on the railroad tracks down there. All that was required was a little sunlight, and then the ash was so fine, it blew away like snow in a subzero wind.

“It’s a beautiful night,” he said to all the nobody around him.

And that was when he thought of the woman. Rio.

The wolf in him was called to her, sure as if she knew his soul’s name and spoke it in a pitch only he could hear . . . sure as if she saw deeply into him and forgave him for his sins, his bad breeding, his worse choices since he’d been imprisoned here.

But humans did not read minds. They did not even know that vampires actually existed—and some of those with fangs and a hankering for blood had mated, willingly or not, with wolven. To create sons who were accepted nowhere.

And who ultimately were double-crossed and sent to prison camps run by evil aristocrats, and then, worse, criminal homegrown madmen.

“Fuck,” he muttered.

That female was just a tool to be used in this game he was getting increasingly disinterested in playing. Nothing more.

What the hell was wrong with him.

Turning away from the vista of bare tree limbs and dead leaves on the ground, he pictured what the porch would have been like some ninety years ago, the beds plugged into docking stations as if they were rowboats in danger of drifting off on the current of the wind.

He’d seen the pictures, down in the records room in the basement. He’d read the logs of the dead—or at least flipped through them.

He felt as helpless as those haunted patients had in those old black-and-white photographs, nothing to look forward to, no choices to be had, no future to speak of.

Sick of himself, sick of the place, sick of . . . everything, Lucan took himself back inside. As always, before he could leave the floor, he had to look at the patient room directly across the way. 518.

Unlike the treatment spaces in the front of the building, these back rooms had no access to any porch, just a single window. Same beds, though. No tables or stools, however.

During his perusals of the records room, he’d learned that the back side was where the people who were going to die were moved to. No reason to try the therapy of the air, anymore. Had they known what the shift across the hall meant?

They had to have known.

Just like he’d known when his cousins had come to him with that look in their eyes . . . he’d known they were going to kill him and he had been ready for the fight.

Except instead, they’d framed him for the murder of a vampire so they could get him permanently out of the way without having any blood on their hands.

Cowards. They’d always been cowards.

Lucan walked off to the stairs that ran down the terminal of the wing. After he pulled open the creaky fire door, he jogged the descent, dodging the debris in the stairwell, the empty, faded beer cans, melted candles, and dingy red balls that the humans thought the ghosts of the children would move cluttering the way.

With every step, he thought of that human woman in the alley.

How could she be involved in such a horrible business?

And no, he wasn’t being sexist.

Even an asshole like him wouldn’t have a damn thing to do with drugging if he’d had a choice.

But maybe she didn’t, either. Maybe she was just like him. Trapped.

She was playing a dangerous game, though. It was one thing to be on the supply side, like he was. Distribution on the streets was how people got killed, and she was in the thick of it.

Then again, she’d walked away from being hit by a car like she was Wonder Woman.

Clearly, she was immortal.